Worldhoppers! : In the Beginning
by The Angry Bunny
Summary: The prologue to a story that'll involve oodles of crossovers and individual characters -- this chapter's mostly just a bit of background info. If people get it, more goes up. Rated for later language.


Time is a funny thing, really. It can't be seen, it can't be felt, it can't be heard, it can't be smelt - and yet, it exists, and there's no one who'd be willing to deny this. It's also very abundant: we have time, animals have time, Earth has time - and time will never end, unless nothing exists, and when nothing exists, how will we know if it ends? Time is a funny thing indeed.  
  
Time is a fickle thing, too. It likes to play and twist and multiply, replicating and expanding and contracting and flying about in a maze of intangible ribbons and threads that touch and break and twine together as different worlds - different universes, all parallel because that's just the way Time likes to work - are created and destroyed, along with their inhabitants. Time is very proud of its ability to keep things sorted out - but, like all other individuals in very demanding positions, Time can screw up every once in a while. Time can skip a bit, causing the same scene to play once or twice - déjà vu, anyone? - and sometimes Time just stops altogether while it tries to sort something out, but no one ever really notices that.  
  
Sometimes, though, Time gets a little too wild with its movements, and one Little Time bumps into another Little Time, and, for a brief moment, the worlds cross, occasionally taking those individuals sensitive to the movement of Time.  
  
This, of course, is a Bad Thing, and since Time has better things to do than carefully plan another bumping-in-to - since they're more difficult to plan than they are to do, for the shifting of worlds must be accomplished at a particular time in a particular place . or, if you're a worldhopper, you can just break out and do it automatically.  
  
Worldhopping, of course, would be why the council that rules over the Afterlife - or the individual, or the god, as no one's ever seen the council in person - created the Department to Regulate the Interdimensional Travel of Substantiate Beings . or DRIT, for short.  
  
DRIT was an off-shoot of the Department of Interdimensional Travel, which in turn was an off-shoot of the Selected Soul Delivery Department, which in turn was overseen by the Department of Soul Selection and Distribution, which was frequently called DisseD.  
  
DisseD, which got its nickname due to the astounding number of disgruntled souls that complained about their assignments when reaching the afterlife again, was the place to which every newly-arrived soul reported once registering their death with the Gatekeeper. When a soul dies, it is given the opportunity to remain in the afterlife as a civilian, take a job with DisseD, or be reborn into a world with which they were highly compatible. No one was sure how DisseD determined this compatibility, but often-times, souls would be sent into a world in which they had a very awful time, leading to a great many tortured individuals in the Realm of the Living.  
  
Now, many of these souls just sucked it up and dealt with it like men, or women, as the case might've been. This was a good thing, as a very small percentage of the misplaced souls had the ability to change their position in Time without killing themselves.  
  
Note the fact that there is a very small percentage present.  
  
This percentage was part of an even greater minority: those with the ability to manipulate time. Time-manipulation abilities are separated into many smaller categories: the ability to touch a timeline to a different timeline at will, the ability to alter a timeline and the memories of those present within it, and the ability to alter objects and persons within a timeline. These persons all possess the ability to world-jump at will - once a person with the ability to touch timelines has completed the connection, this person, and others, can will themselves into the second timeline. However, these persons are also the ones most susceptible to inadvertent time-jumps, and since so few are aware of their abilities, they often get pulled from timeline to timeline until they die, in which case they are almost always given a job with DisseD.  
  
However, some of these souls become aware of their ability to worldhop, and can, after many years, become able to keep themselves planted in a timeline to which they are particularly attached. Those with the ability to time-touch are at a particular advantage: in the event that they become capable of controlling this ability, they can jump where they want, when they want. This is good for a soul seeking a place in the vast not- quite-realm of Time, but . well. Bad for others, as it were, particularly those whose place in the vast not-quite-realm of time involves messing with the destinies of other individuals - the changing of Fates being a heinous crime, according to DisseD, they eventually decided to create DRIT so that these bad-mannered individuals could be tracked and, somehow, returned to the afterlife.  
  
The Department to Regulate the Interdimensional Travel of Substantiate Beings is divided, primarily, into two large groups: one in charge of tracking individuals with the ability to change a timeline and, through great effort, a person's Fate, and one in charge of hunting down time-shift fugitives and fixing whatever mistakes they've made. The first group, WitchWatch (based on the idea that sorceresses, i.e., witches, can change time), is significantly more famous than the second, Just In Time (for lack of a witty name able to be derived from their particular careers), simply because of the idea that those who prevent a crime in the first place are some how more skilled in their work than those who must stop the criminal after the crime has been committed.  
  
This blatant favoritism for the folks who sat on their arses all day waiting for something to beep and signify a deliberate time-touch was what made Just In Time so desperately understaffed, and so desperate for capable - and willing - recruits, and this desperation was what led to one of the biggest fiascos-turned-miracles from some kind of deity that the Afterlife had ever seen. 


End file.
